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Night is narrated by Eliezer, a Jewish teenager who lives, at the book's opening, in his hometown of Sighet in Hungarian Transylvania. Eliezer studies Torah and the Cabbala, Jewish mysticism. His instruction is cut short, however, when his teacher, Moshe the Beadle, is deported. In a few months, Moshe returns, telling a horrifying tale.
The Gestapo (German secret police) took charge of his train, led everybody into the woods, and systematically butchered them. Nobody believes Moshe, who is taken for a lunatic. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, after a series of increasingly repressive measures are passed, the Jews of Eliezer's town are forced into small ghettos within Sighet. Soon after, they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues.
After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz. On Eliezer's arrival in Birkenau, he and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. In the first of many "selections" that Eliezer describes in the memoir, the Jews are evaluated to determine whether they should be killed immediately or put to work. Eliezer and his father seem to pass the evaluation, but before they are brought to the prisoners' barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload. The Jewish arrivals are stripped, shaved, disinfected, and treated with almost unimaginable cruelty.
Eventually, their captors march them from Birkenau to the main camp, Auschwitz. They eventually arrive in Buna, a work camp where Eliezer is put to work in an electrical-fittings factory. Under slave-labor conditions, severely malnourished and decimated by the frequent "selections, " the Jews take solace in caring for each other, in religion, and in Zionism. In the camp, they are subject to unimaginable cruelty, including beatings and repeated humiliations.
A vicious foreman forces Eliezer to give him his gold tooth, which is pried out of his mouth with a rusty spoon. The prisoners are forced to watch the hanging of fellow prisoners in the camp courtyard. On one occasion, the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) even hang a small child who had been associated with some rebels within Buna. Because of the horrific conditions of the camps, and the ever-present danger of death, many of the prisoners themselves begin to slide into cruelty, concerned only with personal survival. Sons begin to abandon and abuse their fathers. Eliezer himself begins to lose his humanity and his faith, both in God and the people around him.
After months in the camp, Eliezerpoorly clothed in the freezing cold undergoes an operation for a foot injury. While he is in the infirmary, however, the Nazis decide to evacuate the camp because the Russians are advancing and are on the verge of liberating Buna. In the middle of a snowstorm, the prisoners begin a death march, forced to run for more than fifty miles to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. Many die of exposure and exhaustion. At Gleiwitz, the prisoners are herded into cattle cars once again. They begin another deadly journey: 100 Jews board the car, but only twelve remain alive by trip's end at the concentration camp Buchenwald.
Throughout the ordeal, Eliezer and his father have helped each other survive through mutual support and concern, but in Buchenwald, Eliezer's father dies of dysentery and physical abuse. Eliezer survives, an empty shell of a man until April 11 th, 1945, when the American army liberates the camp. Eliezer's struggle with his faith is a dominant conflict in Night. At the beginning of the book, his faith in God is absolute. When asked why he prays to God, he answers, "Why did I pray?
Why did I live? Why did I breathe?" His belief in an omnipotent, benevolent God is unconditional, and he cannot imagine living without faith in a Divine power. But this faith is shaken by his experience during the Holocaust. Initially, Eliezer's faith is a product of his studies in Jewish mysticism, which teach that God is everywhere in the world, that nothing exists without God, that in fact everything in the material world is a reflection "emanation " of the Divine world.
In other words, Eliezer has grown up believing that everything on Earth reflects God's holiness and power. His faith is grounded in the idea that God is everywhere, all the time, that his Divinity touches every aspect of his daily life: God is good, and God is everywhere in the world, ergo the world is good. Eliezer's faith is irreparably shaken by the cruelty and evil he witnesses in during the Holocaust. He can't imagine that the concentration camps' unbelievable, disgusting cruelty could possibly reflect divinity. He wonders how a benevolent God could be part of such depravity, and how an omnipotent God could permit such cruelty to take place. His faith is equally shaken by the cruelty and selfishness he sees displayed among the prisoners.
If all the prisoners united together to oppose the cruel oppression of the Nazis, then maybe Eliezer could have viewed the Nazi threat as an evil aberration, and maintained the belief that mankind is essentially good. But he sees that the Holocaust exposes the selfishness, evil, and cruelty of which everybody not only the Nazis, but also his fellow prisoners, his fellow Jews, even himself is capable (see below, "Cruelty/Man's Inhumanity To Man. "). If the world is so disgusting and cruel, he believes, than God must either be disgusting and cruel, or must not exist at all. Though this realization seems to utterly destroy Eliezer's faith, it is incorrect to say that by the end of Night Eliezer has lost all faith. At certain moments during his first night in the camp and during the hanging of the pipelEliezer indeed grapples with his faith, but his struggle with his faith should not be confused with a complete relinquishing of his faith. In fact, Eliezer's struggle with faith is essential, not opposed, to his belief in God.
When Moshe the Beadle is asked why he prays, he replies, "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions. " In other words, questioning is fundamental to the idea of faith in God. The Holocaust forces Eliezer to ask some horrible questions about the nature of good and ev...
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Research essay sample on Faith In God Fellow Prisoners
